ATI Radeon HD 5570 – Sub-$100 HTPC & Gaming Solution

AMD’s clear goal at the moment is to finish rounding-off its HD 5000-series line-up in advance of NVIDIA’s Fermi launch, and so far, it’s doing a good job. It’s continuing its success in this goal with the release of the $80 Radeon HD 5570, a card that’s designed to offer stellar media capabilities along with reasonable gaming performance.

Race Driver: GRID

If you primarily play games on a console, your choices for quality racing games are plenty. On the PC, that’s not so much the case. While there are a good number, there aren’t enough for a given type of racing game, from sim, to arcade. So when Race Driver: GRID first saw its release, many gamers were excited, and for good reason. It’s not a sim in the truest sense of the word, but it’s certainly not arcade, either. It’s somewhere in between.

The game happens to be great fun, though, and similar to console games like Project Gotham Racing, you need a lot of skill to succeed at the game’s default difficulty level. And like most great racing games, GRID happens to look absolutely stellar, and each of the game’s locations look very similar to their real-world counterparts. All in all, no racing fan should ignore this one.

Manual Run-through: For our testing here, we choose the city where both Snoop Dogg and Sublime hit their fame, the LBC, also known as Long Beach City. We choose this level because it’s not overly difficult, and also because it’s simply nice to look at. Our run consists of an entire 2-lap race, with the cars behind us for almost the entire race.

I admit that I was surprised to see the card handle GRID so well. The gameplay wasn’t ideal, but it wasn’t at all sluggish, even at 1080p.

Graphics Card

Best Playable

Min FPS

Avg. FPS

ATI HD 5870 1GB (Reference)

2560×1600 – Max Detail, 4xAA

87

106.43

NVIDIA GTX 295 1792MB (Reference)

2560×1600 – Max Detail, 4xAA

84

103.958

ATI HD 5850 1GB (ASUS)

2560×1600 – Max Detail, 4xAA

68

84.732

NVIDIA GTX 285 1GB (EVGA)

2560×1600 – Max Detail, 4xAA

54

66.042

NVIDIA GTX 275 896MB (Reference)

2560×1600 – Max Detail, 4xAA

52

63.617

ATI HD 4870 1GB (Reference)

2560×1600 – Max Detail, 4xAA

51

63.412

ATI HD 5770 1GB (Reference)

2560×1600 – Max Detail, 4xAA

45

56.980

ATI HD 5770 1GB (Vapor-X)

2560×1600 – Max Detail, 4xAA

42

56.665

NVIDIA GTX 260 896MB (XFX)

2560×1600 – Max Detail, 4xAA

45

54.809

ATI HD 5750 1GB (Sapphire)

2560×1600 – Max Detail, 4xAA

39

47.05

NVIDIA GTX 250 1GB (EVGA)

2560×1600 – Max Detail, 4xAA

35

43.663

ATI HD 5670 512MB (Reference)

1920×1080 – Max Detail, 4xAA

36

47.36

ATI HD 5570 1GB (Sapphire)

1920×1080 – Max Detail, 0xAA

33

41.143

If the HD 5570 has anything on NVIDIA’s lower-end cards, it’s that it can handle GRID at all. For some reason, on both the GT 220 and GT 240, the game is just laggy, and unplayable. ATI’s card handles it just fine.